


Falls the Shadow

by eternal_teapot



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Reichenbach-Related
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-16
Updated: 2012-10-16
Packaged: 2018-02-21 08:30:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2461619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternal_teapot/pseuds/eternal_teapot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John tries to move on past the fall and stalls out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Falls the Shadow

**Author's Note:**

> I'm cleaning and backing up old fills from the BBC kink meme. [Original prompt is here.](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/15638.html?thread=91036438#t91036438) Anything you recognize below does not belong to me, including lines from T.S. Eliot's [The Hollow Men](http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Poem.htm), from which I pull the fic's title. Pretentious as fuck, but then so was Eliot.

_Please, God._ John cannot remember the last time he was in a church--really in a church, for something other than a wedding or a funeral. It doesn't matter, though, because all his prayers tend to sound the same by this point. For years they had been versions of "Please, let Harry stay sober this time." (This one remains in the rotation). And then they were all versions of "Please, God, keep them safe," or "Please, God, take the blood off my hands." He throws in whatever fragments of the Psalms or the Lord's Prayer he remembers as equally empty and rote invocations, a comforting wash of the familiar _hallowed by thy names_ and _I will fear no evils_ to cover over the increasingly familiar sounds of "Please, God, save this boy's life." Please, God. Please, _let me live_.  
  
Now he kneels on the pavement, and none of this will pass his lips, which are opening and closing, opening and closing on the faded talismans. _Hallowed be thy name,_ he thinks. _Hallowed--_

The words fall soundlessly to the pavement. He feels completely empty. _We are the hollow men_  
  
            _We are the stuffed men_

 _Leaning together_  
  
 _Headpiece filled with straw._  
  
Of course, Sherlock thinks (thought) they are _all_ morons, with a possible and reluctant exception made for his brother. _Look at you. You’re all so vacant._ Every time John tries to speak, it is somehow Sherlock’s voice his mind summons from the depths, filling him. This is doubly stupid, given how long John has acted as Sherlock’s intermediary, his voice in the press, in New Scotland Yard, in countless social settings great and small. _I’d be lost without my blogger._ But where are John’s soothing or pointed words when he needs them?

Rain falls in sheets on the window of Ella’s office. _Shape without form, shade without colour._ It is every bit as grey as he remembers it being 18 months before. She is trying to make him find his words--good. “You know why I’m here. I’m here, be--” but the conjunction hitches in his throat. _Paralysed force._ He closes his eyes and is abruptly back on the pavement.  
  
Well. He has come to Ella’s office, because he wants to stop deceiving himself. So: he closes his eyes and stops pretending that he ever left the pavement. “Sherlo--”  
  
The press has been having a field day, of course, and it isn’t just the tabloids any longer. Because it is easier to believe that they have all been taken in than to believe that such a marvelous mind could come clad in such an abrasive (if beautiful) skin. _And why take ye thought for raiment?_ Easier to insist that Sherlock had feet of clay after all, to throw him on the bonfire. John hates the lot of them.

                       _Remember us - if at all - not as lost_  
  
 _Violent souls--Bit of a weirdo if you ask me. Often are, these vigilante types--_ but only a _s the hollow men._ _Fake. Just a magic trick._ Tell me how it was done. Tell me, Sherlock, so that I can understand.

 _The stuffed men._ But you can’t kill an idea. He has to believe that. He has to believe that Sherlock’s brilliance can’t be buried, snuffed out beneath a growing collection of vapid muckraking.  
  
His dreams are oddly full of cases, and all the in-betweens. Chinese take away. Crap telly. Sherlock confusing the names of John’s girlfriends but memorizing the lines of his face. Tea. The sound of Sherlock’s violin--frantic, maddening, 3 AM, gentle, lulling, passionate. Teasing. Bellowing about the collection of leeches suddenly residing in the bathtub. And laughing. So much laughing as Sherlock smiles that smile that reaches his eyes. But he wakes up to the pavement again, and to e _yes I dare not meet in dreams_  
  
 _In death's dream kingdom_  
  
 _These do not appear:_ Sherlock’s chair is empty, across the room from him. John tries to imagine him sitting there, looking back and responding to all the things that he still needs to say, tries to fill all the silences left between them, but all he sees are Sherlock’s eyes filmed over and all that comes is something like “Please, God.” _Let me be no nearer_

 _In death's dream kingdom._ He makes an appointment with Ella, but can say nothing but “I’m sorry” and “I can’t.”

He can’t approach the words he needs. _No nearer-_ -But John is always already kneeling at the corner that has become his sole house of worship, thinking _please._ _Not that final meeting In the twilight kingdom_ of the pavement. He has already stretched out a hand and lost his voice. And heard the sound. And somehow in those twilight moments of rounding the building, of getting run down by the cyclist, John’s own body slammed into the street. He can feel a twin crease in his skull, and raises questing fingers, surprised to find no blood on his brow.  
  
          _Here the stone images_  
  
 _Are raised, here they receive_  
  
 _The supplication of a dead man's hand._ He is not actually taking a pulse. He is dimly aware that he's in shock, and that even if the fingers would obey, the thrum (its absence) beneath would mean nothing to him. Instead he is grasping at the hand that is once more in his, the distance between them finally collapsed. One of these idiots tries to pull him away from Sherlock, to sever their grip, and John is suddenly, violently sure that if she succeeds in pulling his hand away, he will be dead too _u_ _nder the twinkle of a fading star._  
  
 _Is it like this:_ The strains of Mendelssohn no longer drift up to his bedroom as he wakes. John leaves a dream of easy camaraderie and wonders briefly if Sherlock is home. Then memory slams into him, and he knows that he needs to leave 221B for the foreseeable future. He still wonders where Sherlock is, and if it feels this silent In _death's other kingdom. Waking alone_  
  
 _At the hour when we are_  
  
 _Trembling with tenderness_  
  
 _Standing in this cactus land, peopled only with stone images,_ John still checks to make sure Mrs. Hudson is out of earshot before he begins to speak in gulping shards. “You were the best man. And the most human. human being that I have ever known, and no one will ever convince me that you ever told me a lie. So. _There._ ” It is a childish way to end an argument. But then, _I'm dealing with a child_.  
  
He checks again, although John has no idea who he thinks might be listening at this stage. His feet are moving before he knows it, hand reaching out but finding only cold stone. “I was so alone. And I owe you so much.” That should be enough, yes? _Forgive us our debts_. But he can’t leave. _Lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone._ “Please, there’s just one more thing. One more thing. One more miracle, Sherlock, for me.” _O ye of little faith._ “Don’t. be. dead. Would you...just. for me. Just stop it.” He is gasping now, spitting the words through his teeth. “Stop this.” This is John Watson, giving a gravestone what for. He clenches the tremor out of his left hand.

 _There are no eyes here-- Keep your eyes fixed on me. Please, can you do this for me?_ But he couldn’t do that either, could he?

          _This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms_

_In this last of meeting places_

_We grope together_. Sherlock’s hand stretched out toward him, and John reached back, as if he could close the distance between them through sheer force of will. Through force of love. Maybe that was where he’d gone wrong. He still hears " _I will burn the heart out of you."_

 _And avoid speech-_ \- John had said everything he could think of, but the right words never come. And then he had screamed Sherlock’s name, and after that the name had stalled in his throat for weeks. But for the short (eternal) time on the pavement, the words are endless (empty). He vomits them onto the street, at the idiot bystanders who kindly help him straight into perdition. “I’m a doctor” (useless--no one could have survived that fall) and “He’s my friend...He’s my friend.” _My cup runneth over_ and he pushes past the hands and tries to vomit the words directly into Sherlock’s ears, press them into his pores, the cracks in his-- _My cup runneth over._ O ye of little faith. He thinks something is still pouring out of his mouth, uselessly, but the edges of his world are greying. _In this valley of dying stars_  
  
 _Gathered on this beach of the tumid river_  
  
 _Sightless, unless_  
  
 _The eyes reappear._ The bicycle slams into him. John slams into the street. His body emits only a thud of falling flesh and huff of lost air, but what he hears is the crack of bone. By the time he hauls himself upright and passes under the perpetual star to the other hollow man, the other sightless eyes, he is overcome by the sensation of doubling (concussed?), the _m_ _ultifoliate rose of death's twilight kingdom._ He needs to reach the hand on the ground. _The hope only of empty men._ He has slipped sideways into his own corpse, but John knows that if he can just grab the wrist and hold on tight, the world will right itself instead of doing this damned dizzying thing that has his knees buckling and his stomach leaping into his throat.  But all the world does is spin  
  
         _Here we go round the prickly pear_

_Prickly pear prickly pear_  
  
 _What’s incredible though is how spectacularly ignorant he is about some things…Primary school stuff._

         _Here we go round the prickly pear_

_At five o'clock in the morning._

_Oh hell!!! What does that matter? So we go round the sun. If we went round the moon, or round and round the garden like a teddy bear, it wouldn’t make any difference! All that matters to me is the work._ It’s a good thing Sherlock puts no stock in that sort of nonsense, because right now, the world goes round and round this flopping Guy at the corner outside of Barts. The hands not holding John up roll the Guy over, revealing his filmy eyes, and John needs them both to burn. This is John Watson’s corpse at the center of the solar system.  
  
 _Between the idea "Okay, look up. I’m on the rooftop."_ And the reality _"Oh god."_  
  
 _Between the motion_ he should still be running toward the building, but his feet have stuck fast. Terror fills him, and the dread that if he moves, Sherlock will step forward too, the two of them in fatal lockstep that will spill them both into an indelible bloodstain.

 _And the act--_ The blood doesn’t come out. Not completely. He’s looked.

          _Falls the Shadow_

                _For Thine is the Kingdom_

 _Between the conception-_ \- _"It’s all true."_

 _And the creation--_ _"I invented Moriarty."_

 _Between the emotion_ \-- _"You machine--"_ He will never forgive himself--

 _And the response--_  
  
No matter how many times he gets out of the cab, he never finds the words to bring Sherlock down from the edge of the building. It always ends with the two of them joined at the wrist and drained of blood.

 _Falls the Shadow._ He stares at Mrs. Hudson’s face. Breathes, “Oh my god.” And he is an idiot, an _idiot_ and every type of stupid Sherlock has ever called him to have let himself be lured away like this. He runs, and the distance to the street out front elongates into a nightmarish tunnel.

 _Life is very long_. You’d think the stretch of time to the door of 221 would give him plenty of time to think, but of course at that point he didn’t know how paralyzing the silence would be. And the next tunnel isn’t until the twilight after the sound.

       _Between the desire_ What is Sherlock doing on the roof? _Think, John. Faster._ And the spasm “You could.”

 _Between the potency_ “Sherlo--” _And the existence_

 _Between the essence_ “My best friend.”

 _And the descent_ "Goodbye, John."  
  
               _Falls the Shadow._

 _For Thine is the Kingdom_ _Deliver us from evil_. Oh please. Deliver us.  
  
                  _For Thine is-_ -You _could_. Please, God.

 _Life is-_ -He cannot see the final impact from the far side of the shorter building that blocks his view, but he hears the sound. It is only one of the sounds that wakes him, night after night, pinning him to the pavement with all the precision and permanence of the bat on the mantle. Or the Cluedo board. _It’s not actually possible for the victim to have done it, Sherlock._  
  
 _Well it’s the only possible solution...the rules are wrong!_

> For Thine is the
> 
> _This is the way the world ends_ My best friend.
> 
> _This is the way the world ends_ Sherlock Holmes.
> 
> _This is the way the world ends_ Is dead.
> 
> _Not with a bang but a whimper_ Stop this.


End file.
